Droid Kicking Android Butt; EVO Catching Nexus One

Android is like that runaway mine car in the Indiana Jones movie — it’s gathering speed so fast it’s unstoppable. Keeping an eye on published numbers about the share of Android in the smartphone space is always enlightening, but some numbers that look at how Android phones stack up against one another are surprising. We knew the Motorola Droid was popular, given the big promotional campaign Verizon has waged for it along with the fact that sales are outpacing supply. But the size of the Droid lead over other Android phones is huge.

As to the HTC EVO 4G was, which was released less than two weeks ago, the numbers show it’s almost caught up with Google’s own Nexus One. The N1 represents 2 percent of the Android phone usage, and the EVO is already up to 1.93 percent. This demonstrates both how popular the EVO has been with consumers — the phone sold out on launch day — and the degree to which Sprint has been promoting it. The Motorola Droid is outpacing all other Android handsets by a margin of 3 to 1, and that’s impressive.

It’s important to remember that numbers like these should be taken with the caveat that they only represent one company’s statistics that were captured on their own network. These belong to the Chitika ad network, which does those little link ads on many websites that pop up an ad when you click them. The folks at Chitika indicate these numbers are the result of nearly a million ad impressions collected over the first two weeks in June, so there must be some merit in them.